Being Alexander

Meet Alexander Vespucci: Irishman, economist, admirer of women and hopeless drifter in life. Alexander suffers from in situ dislocation and dreams of escaping to freedom, but can manage to do so in his imagination.

Alexander’s friends, his family, his girlfriend – everyone seems to find him a bit odd. And he isn’t entirely in sympathy with them either.

But Alexander is on to something. He has a facility for seeing beauty, truths. He notices being. He comprehends motion and ambiguity. When the Taoiseach shakes his hand and congratulates him on a job well done, Alexander appears to be sinking into ignominous failure. But maybe that is also OK. Perhaps failure is a portal to something bigger.

Set during the pinnacle of the bubble in Dublin, Being Alexander is a book about life, about knowing and noticing things and a satire of Irish society at the height of our recent madness.

About the Author:

Diarmuid Ó Conghaile grew up in Raheny and Malahide, where he now lives with his wife and their two children. As a boy, he threw stones at trains, played football, and swam in the sea. His teenage years were subdued firstly, later explorative. He was a long-time student, ending up with a masters degree in economics from Trinity College Dublin and a postgraduate qualification in law from King’s College London. He also studied for a year on a German-government scholarship in the Freie Üniversität in Berlin, where he almost wrote a thesis on Kafka and met his wife, then living in the very house where Kafka visited Felice Bauer.

Diarmuid has worked as an economist for the European Commission, the Irish government and commercial state-owned companies. He has spoken internationally on public-policy economics and undertaken consultancy work, for example in Colombia. He has also served as a non-executive director of a (successful) financial services company.